Sensei's Library On Tour

    Keywords: Software

Sensei's Library on Tour (SLoT) is a little Java tool, that converts a wiki dump into a set of HTML pages that can be easily converted for reading on a handheld computer or e-book reader.

This page deals with this tool and is maintained by Hans Wiezorke.

Feel free to add comment wherever you see fit.


History

One way to get SL onto a handheld, is to convert the SLSnapshot into a format for one of the many document readers out there. The problem with this approach is, that all the diagrams have to be scaled down, in order to fit onto a small screen. My first attempt to crunch the SLSnapshot with ISiloX resulted in a 40MB document, that only had badly scaled black and white diagrams.

The obvious solution for this is to rebuild the diagrams from their original ascii source and assemble them by putting together several small icons. The original idea for this approach came from AshleyF, who started PocketSL. Since many handheld computers do not come with a web browser, that can interpret JavaScript, I saw the need for a plain HTML version and thus wrote SLoT.

SLoT generates quite a lot of html (currently 62MB), but this html can be compressed very efficiently by web clipping applications. I use ISilo/ISiloX for compressing and viewing and the resulting document is 16MB. By filtering, you can cut this down to a few kB. Small subsets can even be viewed on older 2MB Palms.

Here's what you need:

SLoT
Arno kindly made it available here: [ext] SLoT v0.50 (65KB)
SL dump
A [ext] database dump (5MB) of the SL Wiki database (monthly updated).

(Note that your browser, e.g. Firefox, might automatically decompress the gz file. If so, just remove .gz from the filename and you're done.)

You do not need the SLSnaphot for this.

The readme file in the SLoT package contains all instructions needed.

SLoT features:

Future plans:


This is how the SLoT output can be used with ISilo/ISiloX. ISilo is a shareware (30-days trial version) document browser for Palm and Pocket PC.

  1. Get iSilo (a document browser for handhelds) at [ext] http://www.isilo.com.
  2. Get ISiloX (a document converter for isilo format) at [ext] http://www.isiloX.com.
  3. Install iSilo on the handheld and iSiloX on my desktop.
  4. To convert an HTML document with iSilox, add it to your current project, enter the parameters (see below) and convert it. After that you should see the final iSilo document in your Install window in Palm Desktop. It is important to check the size and specify, that you want to install on the memory card, lest you exceed the amount of available RAM.
  5. Sync your Palm, this can take a while.
  6. Enjoy SLoT :-)

These Parameters worked for me:


Discussion

MarkD: Nice work Hans, just tried it on my new Zire 71. Works great and looks very nice :)
There seems to be a small bug: if you run the program on a linux box, all generated files have names like "html\abcd.html".

HansWiezorke: Thanks. The \ is a bug, that works fine on Windows :). Easy fix: replace "html\\" with "html/" in Slot.java (line 63) and in myWiki/WikiWriter.java (line 47). then recompile Slot.java by typing:

 javac Slot.java

This will be fixed in the next version.

MarkD: Thanks for the bugfix, figured that out myself tonight. Oh and: Nice new homepage for SLoT :)

Dronak: I'm a total newbie and would like to get just the basic files onto my PDA for now, but I don't know which ones those are. Does anyone already have a list of files that would be suitable for this purpose? A modified pagelist.txt file that I could run through SLoT would be good, but whatever you have would be appreciated. BTW, I'm doing the conversion with Plucker instead of iSilo and it seems to have problems going more than 1 link deep, so it would be helpful if the list didn't require going 2 links deep to get all of the information. If you can post a link to the file list, that would be great, but I can provide an e-mail address or something if needed. Thanks in advance.

Dronak: No replies yet, I see, but I have another question. Is it just me, my PDA, Plucker or something, or do boards wider than 13 points take two lines for everyone? It's hard to follow discussion using 19x19 board diagrams when each line takes up two and things get spread out vertically more than they should. The board just doesn't look right and I have a lot of trouble trying to correct for this display issue in my head. Just wondering if this is problem is local or global. Thanks.


Bug reports and wishlist for SLoT 0.50

HansWiezorke: Hi Nico, thanks for the list.

I hope to get some stuff done this weekend. However I have a new very time consuming hobby, my son Benno (4 weeks old) :-).

MarkD: WOW! Congratulations Hans :)

Nico: I join MarkD, my best wishes to you.


Nico: I started to have a look at the code and try out a few things. Hans, you can expect some proposal patches soon...

Achieved so far (in a more or less crude way;):

HansWiezorke: That's great. It seems, you have accomplished a lot of stuff. The only thing I have gotten around to is adding style sheet support. Could you mail me a copy? We should put it all together and make a version 0.6.

Nico: Done ;) I am looking forward to the next version.

SergeStinckwich : I try it on my Linux box, but the links doesn't work, because they are all capitalized ... When the 0.6 version will be released ?

RobAnybody: I have taken the 0.5 code and copied and modified the writer class to output pocketsl-style XMLs (with several small modifications alowing in-text notations (B1, WS). I've also fixed some minor bugs in the code (& not being converted to & , B10 in diagrams, etc.). To whom shall I mail it? Or maybe I'll add for you guys finish with 0.6 and then merge my changes with the new code.

The resulting mass of files is quite smaller than original SLoT, but quite bigger than PocketSL (maybe the database dump has grown so much?) It is now 19M. I will try these days to modify makepagelist too see what will happen if I exclude homepages, humour pages etc.


This is a copy of the living page "Sensei's Library On Tour" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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